Women's Studies
Certificate Program
Courses, Fall 2002
Women's Studies Certificate Program
Coordinator: Patricia T. Clough, Room 5103
(817-8895, 817-8905)
The Certificate in Women's Studies
is an optional course of study for students already enrolled in a Ph.D. program
offered at The Graduate Center. Students matriculating in any of the Ph.D.
programs offered by The Graduate Center are eligible for the Certificate
Program. The Certificate is awarded when the graduate degree is conferred. The
Women's Studies Certificate Program offers course work, guidance in research,
and participation in a wide range of graduate student-faculty activities, such
as lecture series, and forums. It prepares students to teach courses with a
focus on women or gender in any discipline, and to expand the focus of any
professional activity to include women and gender.
WSCP U71700 - Proseminar: Multicultural/Transnational Feminisms
GC W 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Harney / Saldaña
[37750]
The questions underlying this course are: What is the
possibility for feminist agency in the aftermath of the poststructuralist turn
in identity politics at the close of the last century? and what comes after the
debates surrounding the place of race in feminist discourse? In the hope of
formulating responses to these questions, in the first half of the course, we
will examine recent feminist theorizing (1995-present), such as U.S.
poststructural feminist theory, U.S. Third World feminist theory, and
postcolonial feminist theory, focusing on issues of subject formation,
racialization, sexuality, and agency. In the second half of the course we will
consider the relationship of theory to practice in the scene of development and
we will attempt to examine development as well as read theory through the lives
of women and men in the "underdeveloped" world. We will consider how
these lives and this "underdevelopment" have been theorized in the "gender
and development studies" literature. We end the class with an
investigation of the intersection of feminist theory, agency, race, and
development by focusing on two specific case studies from South East Asia and
Africa, and a novel by Paule Marshall.
WSCP U80801 - Major Feminist Texts
GC M 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Cooper / O'Malley
[37751]
[Cross listed with MALS 72100]
This class will explore the recovered traditions of modern feminist thought
beginning with Christine de Pizan in the 15th century and concluding
with recent literary analyses and historical issues of women's human rights and
environmental concerns. Guest speakers will alternate with student rapporteurs
in the class meetings. Texts will include works by such authors as Sor Juana de
la Cruz, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Jacobs, John Stuart and Harriet Taylor
Mill, Clara Zetkin, Virginia Woolf, Eleanor Roosevelt, Simone de Beauvoir and
Betty Friedan, Luce Irigaray, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler and documents from
recent international women's organizations.
WSCP 81000 - Anthropology of Human Rights
GC T 4:15-6:15p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Patricia Mathews-Salazar
[37752]
[Cross listed with Anth 70900]
This course brings the tools of anthropology to bear on the study of human
rights. Where modern anthropology is committed to exploring the diversity of
human experience, the human rights movement seeks the recognition of universal
norms that transcend political and cultural difference. To what extent can
these two goals be reconciled? What can anthropology tell us about the limits
of human rights activism? And how might it contribute to the effectiveness of
the human rights movement?
WSCP 81000 - Prisons and Prisoners: Challenges in Public Policy
JJ M 6:30-8:30p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jacobson [37753]
[Cross listed with CRJ. 79600]
This course will cover recent policy developments in the U.S. in managing
prisons and parole agencies. Specifically, it will examine both the last three
decades of incarceration policy and recent trends in prison and parole
management. Particular attention will be paid to how issues of race and gender
have changed prison and community corrections policy since the 1960's. In
addition, the course will explore the increased role of state legislatures in forming
correctional policy and the relative abandonment of rehabilitation by both
prisons and parole. Finally, the course will focus on prisoner
"re-entry" by discussing problems encountered in the transition from
prison to communities as well as the return to prison by people under parole
supervision. Since over a third of all prison admissions are parolees, and
almost fifty percent of those who leave prison return within three years, we
will spend time analyzing current policy efforts in this area and suggesting
policy reforms of our own. Readings will include the writings of Morris, Daly,
Tonry, Petersilia, Simon, Clear, Travis and others on this subject.
WSCP 81000 - The Arcades Project
GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Koestenbaum [37755]
[Cross listed with Eng 80600]
This seminar attempts to find a use for Walter Benjamin's monumental and
unfinished masterwork, The Arcades Project, a dense, nearly 1000-page
compendium of quotations, speculations, fragments, and ghostly indications.
(The book's topic is the arcades of 19th century Paris, a subject that leads
him to fashion, boredom, photography, advertising, collecting, lighting,
prostitution, gambling, sales clerks, and Baudelaire.) Our main task will be to
read the entire Arcades Project in English translation: one hundred pages per
week. Our second task will be to read other Benjamin essays and fragments (from
the Harvard University Press translation of his Selected Writings), Susan
Buck-Morss's The Dialectic of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project,
and, possibly, other works on the poetics of cities (perhaps Michel de
Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life). Finally, we will engage in local
historical reconstruction: each student will undertake a research project on an
aspect of New York City's past, present, or future, and will write, by the
semester's end, an imaginative essay on his or her archaeological
(clairvoyant?) dig. Though Walter Benjamin is our medium, the seminar's
overarching purpose is to discuss idiosyncratic, visionary ways to read cities
and to write history.
WSCP 81000 -African-American Literature II -The Harlem Renaissance and
Beyond
GC M 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. deJongh [37756]
[Cross listed with Eng. 75600]
This seminar attempts to present a coherent and comprehensive overview of
the discourse of African American literature in the first half of the twentieth
century, from the flowering of new literary talents of the Harlem Renaissance
after World War I to the continuing spirit of cultural renewal of the literary
generations that emerged in subsequent decades. We will study the literary
project of the African American generation of the 1920s and 1930s, popularly
identified with the sign "Harlem Renaissance" but known also as the
"New Negro Movement." We will attempt to establish the dialogic
relationships of New Negro literature to broad modernist concerns of western
culture and to the parallel Africana literary movements outside the United
States as well as to the traditions of American and African American
literature.
WSCP 81000 - Zora Neal Hurston and African American Folk Culture
GC R 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wallace [37757]
[Cross listed with Eng. 85000]
This course will look at the oral traditions of African American folklore
and music and, in particular, its impact on the ethnographic and literary
production of the great black woman writer Zora Neale Hurston. Her works
provide an ideal opportunity for salvaging the largely unrecovered, often
inscrutable, and too frequently neglected cultural and philosophical traditions
that are the legacy of the African American population's passage through
slavery and segregation in the South. As an exemplary native-born Modernist,
Hurston's approach to the black condition and black folklore was always
celebratory. Nevertheless, since she was always signifying, her work can also
be used to provide a first-rate map guiding us nimbly through a range of
perspectives on the black experience. Through reading a selection of her
writings, autobiographical, ethnographic and fictional, we will reconstruct her
path, supplementing her observations with substantial infusions from other
collections of, and observations about the folk tradition, including the
efforts of prior folklorists--Joel Chandler Harris, Paul Lawrence Dunbar and
Charles Chesnutt.
WSCP 81000 - Trauma, Testimony, Mourning: Twentieth-Century Literature
of Witness
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Miller [37758]
[Cross listed with Eng. 86000]
In this course we will examine the work of writers who have borne witness
to the traumatic events of a century fractured by war and atrocity. In addition
to autobiographical narratives (and some poetry) that deal with extreme
experience, readings will include critical studies in trauma and gender theory.
The Holocaust and its aftermath will be a central though not exclusive focus of
the seminar. We will end with a unit on Sept. 11.and the role of visual documents
and monuments in the process of memorialization.
Writers include: Barthes, Beauvoir, Butler, Caruth, Cha, Delbo, Duras,Ernaux,
Felman and Laub, Ginsberg, Freud, Levi, Monette, Roth, Sontag, Steedman. The
work for the course includes the traditional seminar report and 20-page term
paper--both of which, however, may be experimental in form.
WSCP 81000 - Modernisms
GC R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Caws [37759 ]
[Cross listed with Eng. 76000]
A sideways investigation of some different, relatively brief varieties of
the experiences and experiments loosely-termed modernism -- not the Big Novels,
but rather a few movements: Cubism, futurism, vorticism, surrealism; a few
genres: manifestos, travel writing, letters, essays, prose poems, art
criticism, short stories, novellas; a few places: rooms, salons, galleries,
trains. And a few ongoing questions: What does a modernist autobiography look
like? What does/can feminism do with and about modernism(s)? What relations
work best between visual and verbal modernisms? How does Gothic American
Southern relate to modernism?
Readings in Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, John Berger, Carrington, H.D.,
T.S.Eliot, William Faulkner, Ronald Firbank, Henry Green, Henry James, Mina
Loy, Mary McCarthy, James/Jan Morris, Flannery O'Connor, Sylvia Plath, Ezra
Pound, Gertrude Stein, Adrian Stokes, Eudora Welty, Vita Sackville-West, Edith
Wharton ,William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf.
WSCP 81000 - Whiteness Meets English: Literacy/Literature, and A
Critical Pedagogy of Whiteness
GC W 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Shor [37760]
[Cross listed with Eng. 79010]
A century ago, W.E.B. DuBois published THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, where he
declared that the problem of 20th Century America was the color line.
That problem remains in 2002. Dubois's extraordinary book has no equal or
companion vis a vis "the souls of white folk." Why has
"blackness" been so much more marked and examined than
"whiteness"? In her famous 1988 essay, Peggy McIntosh characterized whiteness
as an "invisible knapsack of unearned privileges." Does the unmarked
and under-explored condition of whiteness play down white privilege? Does the
dominant position of whiteness confer protection from scrutiny as well as
license to mark and define others? The under-examined profile of whiteness has
been changing. Since the late 1980s, critical discourses on whiteness have
evolved in multicultural education, feminism, cultural studies, sociology,
critical legal studies, labor history, American studies, and racial identity
theory. This cross-disciplinary field of "whiteness" is
controversial. Some see it potentially re-centering the white position in the
face of multicultural efforts to dismantle racism. Others see it as an overdue
inquiry into "invisible whiteness."
WRITINGS: 1) Weekly journals on the readings. 2) Final synthesis paper
(10 pages).
WSCP 81000 - African Women Writers
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m, Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Allan [37761]
[Cross listed with Eng. 88000]
Novels by Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Ba, Zoe
Wicomb, Flora Nwapa, Lauretta Ngcobo, Tisitsi Dangarembga, Yvonne Vera, Lindsey
Collen, and Nawal el Saadawi - to name a few of Africa's writing women - make
for compelling reading for students interested in the history and cultures of
the African world and current cultural and theoretical trends in literary
studies. This course examines simultaneously African women's unique
contribution to the development of modern literature in Africa and the impact
of this artistic intervention on a range of issues, including cultural and
gender politics, transnational feminism, and diaspora. Some of the books to be
studied in the course include A Question of Power, So Long a Letter, Changes,
And They Didn't Die, Kehinde, Nervous Conditions, and The Rape of Sita.
Readings will also include critical analyses by African and international
scholars.
WSCP 81000 - Proust I
GC T 6:30-8:30, Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Sedgwick, [37762]
[Cross listed with Eng 87100]
This is a year-long seminar organized around a close, start-to-finish
reading of Marcel Proust's A la recherche. We will be considering a
wide range of the issues, motives, and ambitions embodied in the novel, including
its complicated relation to the emerging discourses of Euro- American
homosexuality. Other preoccupations that I hope will emerge through our
discussions include the changing possibilities of novelistic genre; narratorial
consciousness; texture; habit and addiction; experimental identities; adult
relations to childhood; the spatialities of present and past; the vicissitudes
of gender; the bourgeois maternal in relation to such other roles as the
grandmother, the aunt, the uncle, and a variety of domestic workers;
alternatives to triangular desire and Oedipalized psychology; the languages of
affect; phallic and non-phallic sexualities; the phenomenology and epistemology
of oneiric states; the relations between Jewish diasporic being and queer diasporic
being within modernism; and the affective, phenomenological, and philosophical
ramifications of an interest in the transmigration of souls - to name but a
few. Seminar participants are free to read Proust in English, French, or some
convenient combination of both. We will be interested in the differences made
by different translations.
WSCP 81000 - Perversity and Contemporary American Poetry
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Koestenbaum
[37763]
[Cross listed with Eng 87200]
All verse is perverse, but this seminar makes special claims for the place
of perversity in the contemporary American poetic scene. "Perversity"
implies sexual errancy but also points to other "wrong" turns,
including aesthetic felicities we could not live without. We will emphasize the
role of objects--Things--in the work of consciousness, whether sublime or
everyday. Sometimes these objects are inanimate, material; sometimes they are
phantasmal fetishes. Indeed, the course could be subtitled, after an Amy
Gerstler poem, "The Sexuality of Objects."
We will read one volume of poetry per week. The syllabus in no way represents
the entire field of contemporary American poetry; the quixotic list reflects,
instead, my allegiances. Many of these poets are queer; all are living and
refractory, and practice refusal. Some of the following will appear on the
syllabus: Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, Eileen Myles, Thom Gunn, Myung Mi Kim,
John Ashbery, Ha Jin, Louise Glück, Harryette Mullen, Reginald Shepherd, Anne
Carson, Wanda Coleman, Frank Bidart, Richard Howard, David Trinidad. And
more... (We will start with Adrienne Rich, and probably devote two weeks to her
poems.) Some of these names may be obscure to you: part of contemporary
poetry's perversity is its sectarian hiddenness. Requirements: a final essay,
and a class presentation (which will take the form of a two-page position
paper).
WSCP 81000 - French Feminisms
GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Stanton [37764]
[Cross listed with Fren 87100] (Course taught in English)
This course will examine the complex development of different forms of
20th-century French Feminism, from the socialist and pacifist conferences of
the early 1900s and the conservative feminism of the 1930s, to the
existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir and l'écriture féminine of the 1970s, down
to the legislative partié movement of today. In the process, we will consider
why France was the last European country to give suffrage to women (in 1945);
why feminism never became a national movement in France after the fight for
abortion rights in 1974; and why feminism has become a dirty word in France,
often conflated with Americanism. We will not limit ourselves to continental
France, but also discuss through our readings, French Canada, the Caribbean and
Africa since the 1960s.
Work for the course will include weekly paragraphs (comments and/or questions)
on the readings; two class presentations; a 10-page research project or
critical analysis; and a final exam. Authors to be read include: Auclert,
Brion, Pelletier, Wittig, Leclerc, Beyala, Ba, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva,
Delphy, Le Doeuf, Agacinsky, and Badinter. The course will be conducted in
English; readings are in French; but wherever possible, translations will be
placed on reserve. The syllabus will be posted over the summer; please address
any questions to Domna Stanton (dstanton@gc.cuny.edu or dcs@umich.edu).
WSCP 81000 - Women in Early America, 1607-1820
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Berkin [37765]
[Cross listed with Hist. 75300]
This course examines the lives of American women- European, Indian, and
African- from the colonial period to the early l9th century. Close attention
will be paid to the following topics: demographic patterns and family
structure; gender ideology; women and the law; regional, racial and class
differences. The course also examines the scholarly literature on early
American women, focusing on central historigraphical debates and issues of
methodology. Readings will include primary sources as well as secondary
sources. Course Requirements: Students
will write 3-5 page critiques of each week's assigned readings. Discussions will
focus on the questions raised in these student papers. A final paper, using
primary source materials, will also be required.
WSCP 81000 - History/Theory/Practice: Interactive Media
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Greenbaum / Clough
[37766]
[Cross listed with ITCP 70010]
This course examines the history of interactive media, including its
economic, social, and intellectual developments, to consider how links between
science and technology shape the ways we think and act in the academy, in
industry, and in everyday life. The course also examines the coinciding
legacies of fascination with and ambivalence about technology, looking at
notions of technological determinism, in particular, to gauge the expansive
impact of technology on pedagogy and education. In addition, this core course
explores the history and theory of hypertext and new media, highlighting the
theoretical and practical possibilities for research, reading, and writing in a
world where new, nonlinear narrative structures are becoming the norm. The
first part of the course employs readings in history and social theory to
explore interactive technology as a subset of science and technology in the
twentieth century. The second part of the course focuses attention on science,
technology, and the classroom, exploring the support for (and opposition to)
the complex coupling of technology and pedagogy. This course will also explore
larger philosophical and political issues related to the equitable access to
technology by traditionally underserved groups, the so-called digital divide.
Final course requirements include an analytical research paper.
WSCP 81000 - Gender Politics in Comparative Perspective
GC M 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Gelb [37767]
[Cross listed with P SC 77902]
This course will compare systems of representation and participation for
women in the US , selected other nations (to be drawn from Britain, the
Scandinavian countries, Canada and France), and Japan , from the local level to
the national. The course will analyze women's role through electoral and
movement/interest group politics. Readings and discussion will also address the
emerging role of international feminism and changing international gender
equity norms on national policies. Which systems appear most women friendly;
are there rule changes that foster a greater role for women in politics and
policy-making?
Students will be prepare a review of the role of women in politics in one nation
of their choice and will be asked to make a class presentation. There will be a
final examination. Course reading will include books such as: Norris and
Lovenduski, Women in Politics, O'Connor ,Orloff and Shaver, States Markets and
Families, Keck and Sikkink , Activists Without Borders, Stetson and Mazur on
comparative state feminism, Darcy Welch and Clark, Women and Electoral
Politics.
WSCP 81000 - Electoral Politics
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Fox Piven [37768]
[Cross listed with P SC 82601]
This course will examine the interplay between the distinctive American party
system, the issues and cleavages which emerge at different periods in American
politics, and the changing shape of the American electorate, as well as
shifting patterns of electoral alignment. We will begin by considering some of
the main perspectives which purport to explain the behavior of voters, the role
of parties, and the origins of electoral systems. Then we will turn to a review
of long term shifts that have occurred in the United States in the scale of
voter participation, in the class, racial and gender skew of the electorate,
and in the cleavages which organize the electorate, paying particular attention
to the character of the party system that developed after the Civil War, and
its persisting impact on national electoral politics. Lastly, we will turn to
developments in American electoral politics in the past two decades, including
the evidence of recent realignment or dealignment, and changes in the character
of the American parties. Finally, we will consider the prospects for a
democratic reinvigoration of electoral politics in the United States.
WSCP 81000 -Health Psychology
GC M 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Revenson [37769]
[Cross listed with Psych 80103]
The connection between the mind and the body is a hot topic of scientific
investigation. In this course, we examine the ways that behavior and health are
related from a variety of theoretical perspectives. We study findings on the effects
of long-term stress on susceptibility to illness, including the common cold. We
explore healthy people's risk perceptions and how they affect behavior change.
We explore the social context of health, including how social conditions,
social inequalities, and patient-provider relationships affect health. We find
out how to optimize adaptation to chronic illnesses, such as breast cancer and
AIDS.
The aims of this course are three-fold. First, students will become acquainted
with the current state of knowledge in health psychology. Second, students will
develop an understanding of the models, theories, and methods used to explore
person and environment factors (and their interaction) in health and disease.
Third, substantive issues will be discussed with an awareness of sociocultural
diversity and the importance of understanding context; specifically, each topic
area will be examined as it relates to issues of gender, age, sexual
orientation and race/ethnicity. This
course fulfills a requirement for the Concentration in Health Psychology.
WSCP 81000 -Telling Lives
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Ouellette / Brownstein
[37770]
[Cross listed with Psych 80100]
This new course, taught by faculty from English, Psychology, and Women's
Studies, examines and engages biographical work at the intersections of
literature, social science, and the arts. The first part of the course will
involve the systematic gathering of theoretical and methodological tools for
telling lives. We will specify differences among the ways lives are told by
people who come from different disciplines, and reveal distinctions among and
connections between the disciplines. The aim is to enable students to develop
conceptual frameworks and strategies for research and writing that they will
apply and elaborate in their own writing of a life story. This writing will be
the defining project for the semester. A variety of case studies and brief
lives will be employed as sources and test cases for this foundational work.
The second unit of the course will focus on identity, a key concept in several
contemporary intellectual endeavors. Specifically, we will look at what we can
learn about the usefulness and limitations of identity as a concept across
disciplines from (a) novels and academic texts; (b) memoirs by several
contemporary women writers; and (c) interviews recently conducted with men and
women from several ethnic/racial groups in the city. We will move from this to
an examination of the special case of writing a writer's life, dealing with
questions like: Do we write about a writer in the same way that we write about
others? What do we do when we have a lot of texts, a superabundance of
materials? The next two or three weeks will involve the analysis of two
biographies or life studies; one from literature, and the other, from
psychology. These well represent two of the possible meanings for the course's
title: lives matter, and accounts of lives matter. Finally, we will look at
late 20th century representations of testimony and autobiography, and
considerations of how they challenge and elaborate theory and method for
telling lives.
WSCP 81000 -Locating Culture: The Anthropology of Space and Place
GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Low [37771]
[Cross listed with Psych 80100]
This seminar begins with a discussion of spatializing culture, that is the
way that culture is produced and expressed spatially, and the way that space
reflects and changes culture. The concepts of culture and space are then
materially and theoretically linked through an exploration of specific cultural
spaces.
The readings are organized around six areas of focus: Embodied Spaces
(proxemics, phenomenology of space, language and space, and spatial
orientation), Gendered Spaces (female and male spaces, and evolution of the
house and home), Contested Spaces (spaces of resistance and conflict, and
hierarchies expressed in space and place), Transnational and Translocal Spaces
(markets, nations, and ethnoscapes), Inscribed Spaces (places of memory and
longing), and Spatial Tactics heterotopias, gated communities, and historically
preserved spaces).
Over the course of two week units, classic and current articles will be read,
discussed, then critiqued for their contribution to this emerging area of
study. Students will be asked to present their own reflections on the readings,
and offer they own ideas about how cultural spaces are to be understood as well
as how they are produced, contested and in some cases transformed. This seminar
will be an unique opportunity to put together a critical body of literature and
to participate in the formation of a new way of looking at space/place. Each
student will be expected to bring their interests and work into the body of the
class and to prepare a presentation and short paper on an ethnography on their
area of interest as it relates to the material in the course. All level
students are invited to participate.
WSCP 81000 - Architecture Theory, Process, and Practice
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA , 3 credits, Prof. Chapin [37772]
[Cross listed with Psych 80100]
People
in the program ought to be familiar with how designers think and operate,
especially if they hope to affect the built environment. There is a lot of
reading of theory in this seminar. Theory has gotten all the more interesting
over the past years with the ascendancy of feminist work (spiced a bit by queer
theory). [Note that to a large degree designers think of themselves
atheoretically, standing for aesthetics, not politics…] There is also a lot of
emerging work on sustainable design (including some pretty bogus stuff in the
new urbanism camp). We try to do experiential visits to vivid places. Also, we
learn some about how designers operate moving from architectural programs to
design sketches to working drawings and other contract documents. Of course, I
do emphasize architecture and its professional culture. The basic assignment is
to find many ways of applying design theory directly to a real place in
everyday life.
WSCP 81000 - The Social Unconscious: Culture, Self and Society
GC W 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m., (NOTE NEW TIME!!!) Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof.
Silver [37773]
[Cross listed with Soc 83101]
In this seminar we engage in a critical analysis of the role of the unconscious
in the analysis of self, culture and society. The seminar focuses on the
theoretical implications of making unconscious mechanisms central to modern and
post-modern social theorizing. Class readings are organized around issues of
self, subjectivity, and language combined with an analysis of social
institutions and processes, such as the dynamics of power and domination in
intimate relations, organizational settings, communities and nations. We
analyze the latent meanings and unacknowledged fears expressed in narratives
about race, gender, and age. We explore the re-enforcing mechanisms of
unconscious desires, psychic conflicts and ideologies through which the social
order is defined, distorted and transformed. We also discuss methods used to study
the tensions, contradictions and ambivalences embedded in this view of social
reality.
WSCP 81000 - Global Crossings: Rethinking the Links between Culture and
Political Economy
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Clough [37774]
[Cross listed with Soc 82100]
Global Crossing, a company that advertises 'one planet and one network: a
million possibilities,' like Enron, presently is being investigated for its
accounting practices. What now is to be made of globalized capital and its
attendant cultural formations? Against the number of historical accounts of the
rise and demise of the Keynesian-Fordist regime as preconditioning the recent
thrust to globalize capital and teletechnology, the course aims to elaborate a
political economic analysis necessary to grasp the workings of today's
capitalism and to re-articulate the relationship of political economy and world
cultural formations. Thinking beyond recent cultural criticisms--feminist
criticism, queer theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies of science and
critical race theory, the course focuses on three shifts in the linking of
political economy and cultural formation: 1) the shift from a discourse of
desire to discourse of affect, 2) the shift from organism-centricism and human
bodies to non-organic life and other than human bodies and 3) the shift from
disciplinary societies to control societies. Readings will include both
theoretical texts and accounts of empirical research and cultural productions
including film and fiction. Students taking
the course will have access to the ongoing Rockefeller Foundation-funded
seminar at The Center for the Study of Women and Society/CUNY, Facing Global
Capitalism, Finding Human Security: A Gendered Critique.
WSCP 81000 - Gender, Identity and the Workplace
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Fuchs Epstein [37775]
[Cross listed with Soc 73200]
This course will explore the interaction between gender, identity, and the
workplace. It will examine the interaction between the "public" world
of work and the "private" sphere of the self. It will consider
people's own notions of "self" in the context of gender, class and
ethnicity, and the intervention of organizations in molding, changing and
controlling identities. It will examine how gender identities mediate and
orient individuals to select particular work roles, locate within them and
engage in transformative experiences. What it means to be "a man; or
"a woman" in today's changing work settings will be a focus. We will
acknowledge the multiplicity of selves individuals may have in post-industrial
society and the social construction of identities at work. In other words we
will be looking at the ways in which organizations self consciously and
inadvertently structure the minds, hearts and psyches of workers. We will also
look at resistance and agency on the part of workers in preserving and
constructing their identities. The course will include issues of masculinity
and femininity; sexual identities, and identity with community and organization,
work satisfaction, the manipulation of discourses and rhetoric regarding work
roles, feminism and masculinity. Diverse workplaces will be examined including
the sex industry, corporate organizations, and service work looking at identity
transformation in such occupational roles as fashion designer, telephone
operator, computer programmer, lawyer, and firefighter. We will read works that
deal with the theories of the self (e.g. Markus, Deaux, Bandura, Mead); case
studies on organizational and workplace impact on the identities of individuals
(e.g. Kondo, Casey, Hochschild), issues of discourse and narrative (Bruner),
and the consequences of massive political social change on personality (e.g.
Sennett).
WSCP 81000 - Social Welfare Policy and Planning
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Abramovitz [37777]
[Cross listed with SSW 71000]
Social welfare policy represents solutions to social problems. This
advanced introduction to social welfare policy in the United States reviews the
history of the US welfare state; contemporary social welfare policies; social,
economic and political forces contributing to the expansion and contraction of
the welfare state, and alternative welfare state models. With a view toward
developing framework for analyzing social welfare policy and the skills for
critical analysis, the course examines social welfare policy through the
filters of history, welfare state theories, political ideologies and social
change. Special attention is paid to dynamics of race, gender and class and to
Feminist theories of the welfare state. In a final paper, students conduct
policy analysis using the frameworks developed in class.
WSCP 81000 - The History of Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Before
Video
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Schulman [37778]
[Cross listed with Thea 81500]
Beginning with Thomas Edison's Sound Experiment of two men dancing, lesbian
and gay images are as old as the history of cinema. As with all new art ideas,
form and technological innovation in film historically originates in the
margins and then is integrated by the center. The creative explosion that has
been the evolution of gay and lesbian identity in the 20th century
was accompanied at every turn by visual discovery and formal invention evident in
the film works created out of this cultural transformation. In this course, we
will look at both gay and lesbian images, and gay and lesbian perspectives, as
articulated in Experimental Film. We will view representational examples from
Eisenstein's homoerotic unedited Mexico footage, to Shirley Clarke's Portrait
of Jason, from Curt MacDowell's Loads, to Stu Friedrich's First Comes Love. In
terms of content and image, we will see how gay people have expressed their
condition, and most importantly - how experimental structures can convey the
gay and lesbian experience in ways that conventional narrative cannot. Readings
include catalogs and program notes from fourteen years of the MIX Festival,
plus articles and interviews with makers whose works originated in MIX and were
then shown in The Whitney Biennial, The Berlin Film Festival, and other global
venues.
WSCP 81000 - Theatricality in Film
GC R 6:30-9:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Margolies [37779 ]
[Cross listed with Thea 81500]
This course on theatricality in film asks the following question: how do
certain traits of theater -- such as enhanced physicality, visible proscenium,
spatial convergence, marked blocking, excessive gesture, emphasis on text,
tableau formations, direct audience address- bring into cinema a reciprocal
framing of "natural" and "artificial." Theatricality in
film is intrinsically related to a thematization of truth. The course examines
what distinguishes sincerity from artifice, audience from scene, catharsis from
distanciation, one version of the self from another in particular films. The
course will discuss: the historical and philosophical roots of an
anti-theatrical prejudice; dramaturgical analogies for social interaction (the
notion of mimicry in social formation and of social front and stigma in
Goffman); notions of acting out in psychoanalysis and in psychodrama; the
association of theatricality and femininity (Femininity as masquerade,
hysteria, excess); the notion of liminality. The course will also introduce the
main arguments on the distinction between theatre and film and how cinema has
appropriated theatre. The course will present and discuss films involved in
farce and disguise (Lubitch's To Be or Not to Be, Chaplin's The Great
Dictator); confessional modes in film and the relation of cinema verité with
psychodrama (Chronicle of a Summer, Peggy Ahwesh's Doppleganger, Ann
Robertson's diary films, Warhol's portraits); ritual possession and
ethnographic film (Les Maitres Fous); films that explicitly use the theater as
the setting for possession and the transformation of the self (Cassavetes'
Opening Night and A Woman Under the Influence); the use of the theatre and
acting to question notions of artifice and sincerity (The Golden Coach, Mohsen
Makbalbaff's Salaam Cinema); the notion of reenactment and moral exemplarity in
film (Zavatnni/Maselli and Antonioni's episodes in Love in the City,
Kiarostami's Close Up, Jhang Yuan's Sons). Reading list available in
Certificate Programs office (Room 5109).